Beware Government by Fear, Decree

Review by Bill Doughty–

Soldiers of the U.S. Army's 9th Armored Division reach Remagen Bridge in early March 1945.

There is a reason books about fascism, imperialism and authoritarianism refer to historian Hannah Arendt.

Her "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (Schoken Books, Random House, 1948, 1957; renewed 1976) is the motherlode of warnings about the growth and acceptance of such movements and leaders. The book is a call for vigilance and action and a rejection of apathy.

Arendt shows how dictators can rise from catastrophes and destruction. She explains how an "open disregard for law and legal institutions and ideological justification of lawlessness" allow totalitarianism to flourish. And she warns about the autocratic tendency to destroy norms, spread lies, and rule by decree.

Government of, by and for the people is the opposite of government by dictate or bureaucracy under the ultimate control of an all-powerful "Leader" (using Arendt's capital L). The megalomaniacal autocrat ignores controls within the government and creates a "secret society in broad daylight."

Hitler's 1939 Action T4 justified killing disabled children and adults. 

"Legally, government by bureaucracy is government by decree, and this means that power, which in constitutional government only enforces the law, becomes the direct source of all legislation," according to Arendt. 

The bureaucrat, who by merely administering decrees has the illusion of constant action, feels tremendously superior to these 'impractical' people who are forever entangled in 'legal niceties' and therefore stay outside the sphere of power which to him is the source of everything."

"Arbitrary power, unrestricted by law, wielded in the interest of the ruler and hostile to the interests of the governed, on one hand, fear as the principle of action, namely fear of the people by the ruler and fear of the ruler by the people, on the other – these have been the hallmarks of tyranny..."

The dictator/leader through his appointed chief law enforcement officer (a.k.a. attorney general) becomes the ultimate administrator of the law:

"The administrator considers the law to be powerless because it is by definition separated from its application. The decree, on the other hand, does not exist at all except if and when it is applied; it needs no justification except applicability. It is true that decrees are used by all governments in times of emergency, but then the emergency itself is a clear justification and automatic limitation. In governments by bureaucracy decrees appear in their naked purity as though they were no longer issued by powerful men, but were the incarnation of power itself and the administrator only its accidental agent. There are no general principles which simple reason can understand behind the decree, but ever-changing circumstances which only an expert can know in detail. People ruled by decree never know what rules them because of the impossibility of understanding decrees in themselves and the carefully organized ignorance of specific circumstances and their practical significance in which all administrators keep their subjects."

"The Leader's absolute monopoly of power and authority is most conspicuous in the relationship between him and his chief of police (Himmler in Nazi Germany), who in totalitarian country occupies the most powerful public position," Arendt writes. Even if the chief law enforcement officer does not have absolute executive power, "this does not prevent (him) from organizing his enormous apparatus in accordance with totalitarian power principles."

Then the good people in government are forced to choose: either stay and try to be an influence for what is right or leave and escape the fear and terror. But a narcissistic autocrat often does not give them a choice. Paranoid and deranged, he purges those who are opposed to the rule of law. He never accepts blame or responsibility for failure: "If he wants to correct his own errors, he must liquidate those who carried them out," Arendt writes.

"The humiliation implicit in owing a job to the unjust elimination of one's predecessor has the same demoralizing effect that the elimination of the Jews had upon the German professions: it makes every jobholder a conscious accomplice in the crimes of the government, their beneficiary whether he likes it or not, with the result that the more sensitive the humiliated individual happens to be, the more ardently he will defend the regime. In other words, this system is the logical outgrowth of the Leader principle in its full implications and the best possible guarantee for loyalty, in that it makes every new generation depend for its livelihood on the current political line of the Leader which started the job-creating purge."

Nazis – "living corpses" – at Christmas, date unknown.

As members of the leader's inner circle carry out the Leader's decrees their identity and morality are killed off and they become "living corpses," she says. "The first essential step on the road to total domination is to kill the judicial person in man." The autocrat rules with a vulgar and demoralizing destruction of norms.

Vulgarity replaces "generally accepted intellectual, cultural and moral standards" in the republic. "Vulgarity with its cynical dismissal of respected standards and accepted theories carried with it a frank admission of the worst and a disregard for all pretenses which were easily mistaken for courage and a new style of life," Arendt writes.

Corruption becomes the modus operandi. It was a problem in anti-Semitic France  in the late 1800s, when the bureaucracy "gained control of public funds and how the Budget Commission was governed entirely by public interests." And, "Corruption, the curse of the Russian administration from the beginning, was also present during the last years of the Nazi regime..."

Weaponizing their corruption, dictators target media, intellectuals and free-thinking artists and creators.

"Wherever totalitarian movements seized power, this whole group of sympathizers was shaken off even before the regimes proceeded toward their greatest crimes. Intellectual, spiritual, and artistic initiative is as dangerous to totalitarianism as the gangster initiative of the mob, and both are more dangerous than mere political opposition. The consistent persecution of every higher form of intellectual activity by the new mass leaders springs from more than their natural resentment against everything they cannot understand. Total domination does not allow for free initiative in any field of life, for any activity that is not entirely predictable. Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty."

After the Leader eliminates nonbelievers, naysayers, whistleblowers and independent voices in his inner circle, he is then surrounded by sycophants who can reinforce his belief in his own lies. The authoritarian autocrat believes in his own omnipotence. Hitler said he was "irreplaceable" and that "the destiny of the Reich depends on me alone."



The goal is to remove all independence of thought, courage of conscience, and creativity of the individual. The same elimination of free thought and action happened purposefully in the camps as well.

In Germany, concentration and extermination camps were "meant not only to exterminate people and degrade human beings, but also serve the ghastly experiment of eliminating, under scientifically controlled conditions, spontaneity itself as an expression of human behavior and of transforming the human personality into a mere thing," according to Arendt. "Terror enforces oblivion."

Cries and resignation in Nazi Germany.

Hitler initiated a campaign of fear and warlike terror in the name of Germany. His initiative was a means to stabilize and feed the economy – "'guns and butter' actually meant 'butter through guns.'" Arendt notes, "One may even surmise that one of Hitler's reasons for provoking this war was that it enabled him to accelerate the development in a manner that would have been unthinkable in peacetime."

Authoritarian leaders collude and corrupt to investigate and denounce political opponents. They get rid of possible successors or anyone who dares question their decrees, directives and lawless orders.

"Deadly danger to any civilization is no longer likely to come from without," Arendt warns. The emergence of totalitarian governments is a phenomenon within, not outside, our civilization. The danger is that a global, universally interrelated civilization may produce barbarians from its own midst by forcing millions of people into conditions which, despite all appearances, are conditions of savages."

This is one of at least two Navy Reads reviews of the Arendt's monumental work on the forensics of totalitarianism, a highly recommended book for anyone involved in defending democracy and the Constitution.

This is also a good selection for Women's History Month in March. Hannah Arendt, who immigrated to the United States and became an American citizen in 1950, is widely considered one of the great philosophers and political thinkers of the 20th century.

One hundred years ago: Arendt in 1920

In this edition of "Origins," Samantha Power provides the book's introduction. "In contemporary debates over ethnic conflict, genocide, international rights, sovereignty and terrorism, (Arendt's) writings have retained a profound pertinence that augurs well for her permanent place among the masters," Power writes. "She understood that barbarous regimes could not come into being overnight."

Power writes of militant Islam including the attacks of 9/11, genocide in in Rwanda, Mao's so-called "Great Leap Forward," Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge terror in Cambodia, and ethnic cleansing for a "Greater Serbia" in the Balkans. She highlights "Arendt's prophetic skepticism about the enforceability of international human rights," and says hope rests with individual activists, organizers and journalists, though that may be a challenge.

"In some countries state control is so fierce that independent voices are muzzled and marginalized, power and wealth are concentrated among elites, and injustice rules. In others, war or occupation have brought such ruin and humiliation that civil society cannot flower and no amount of organizing can restore living standards or human dignity. It is from some of these countries that contemporary terrorist threats hail, and it is here that 'Origins' offers further wisdom for today's dark times – wisdom that we ignore at our peril."

Samantha Power is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, political thinker and diplomat who served as the 28th United States Ambassador to the United Nations from 2013 to 2017. Hers is a call for collaboration, cooperation and action instead of fear and apathy.

Navy Veteran and former Secretary of State John Kerry with then United States Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power, Oct. 2, 2015.